Beloved – Toni Morrison

Ange - Tall, Short, Tiny & a Pickle2 Comments

BOOK #223
Reviewer: Tall, Short, Tiny & a Pickle

BelovedBeloved was my first Toni Morrison novel, and golly, what a place to start. This is a powerful story, with memorable characters and a strong sense of history.

Beloved tells the story of Sethe and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, who have escaped from slavery to Ohio – a free state – after the American Civil War.

In order to keep her children safe, Sethe tries to kill Denver and her three siblings, but is is successful in killing only her eldest daughter. Her two sons run away, and Denver is just a baby at the time, but her older sister, age two, is buried with a tombstone with simply “Beloved” on it. When a strange young woman appears on their new front porch, saying nothing about who she is but claiming her name is Beloved, Sethe believes that she is her murdered daughter. She falls over backwards to spoil Beloved, offering her the best of everything, including food, to the detriment of her own health. While Sethe wastes away, Beloved grows larger; she becomes very demanding and throws toddler-like tantrums when she doesn’t get her way.

While Sethe’s actions towards her children seem abhorrent on the surface, one of her redeeming features is her intense devotion to her children; her attempts at murder are to keep her children protected from the horrors she experienced as a slave. I went through stages of loving and hating Sethe for her treatment of Beloved and Denver, and by the end of the story, I still had mixed feelings towards her.

Denver is a shy, intelligent girl, often portrayed as possessing a gift for communicating with ghosts. While Beloved flourishes, Denver appears to withdraw further from the outside world, but by the end of the novel, she is proven to be much stronger, more courageous and determined than I first thought. Denver is the most interesting of characters, for me, and I found her a fascinating character.

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

The character of Beloved is also intriguing, and throughout the story, Morrison presents three different perspectives regarding who Beloved may be. She may simply be a stranger, a young woman who has been kept locked away as a slave for many years, which would account for her language and social difficulties. Sethe believes her to be her Beloved, her toddler, because of the way she acts, her outward appearance, her breath that smells like milk and her knowledge of a few facts that only one of Sethe’s children could know. In later chapters, Beloved tells stories that make Sethe and the reader wonder if she is Sethe’s mother; she shares personal traits with Sethe’s mother and recounts stories of her voyage to America from Africa.

Beloved is a great story, with a strong sense of the power the past can have over people, and how they can either overcome it, or let it haunt them forever. It is uplifting, horrifying, saddening and hopeful all at once, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

Ms Oh Waily2 Comments

Book # 565

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

CRWhen I read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men back in 2012 I meant to follow up immediately with this relatively slim novel.  Sadly I moved on and Cannery Row had to wait until now.

Let me start off the review by saying outright – I loved this.  Everything about it.  And my review may be overly glowing as a result.

The novel was first published in 1945 but it is set during the Great Depression.  Specifically it is set in Monterey, California and one particular avenue which is colloquially known as Cannery Row for it’s rows of sardine canneries*. It is the story of the locals on the Row.  Lee Chong is the local grocer and shopkeeper.  Dora Flood is the local Madam and owner of the misnamed Bear Flag Restaurant, where her girls are available to the local population.  Doc is a marine biologist who owns and lives in his workshop at Western Biological, and then there are Mack and ‘the boys’ – squatters in Lee Chong’s warehouse known as the Palace Flophouse and Grill.

The novel is barely a novel in the sense of having a plot.  Really it feels like a meander through the lives of these many and varied characters.  The thread that holds it all together are the ‘boys’ from the flophouse.  Mack, Hazel, Jones and Eddie pop up throughout and provide much of the entertaining reading.  But we are treated to vignettes of life amongst a range of locals, we are invited in to their lives and given an insight into the hard lives of the depression.

You would think that a novel set in the depression with the central characters being a group of bums would be, in itself, depressing.  You would be wrong.  Other than a few poignant sections, the joie de vivre that exudes from the pages belies the harshness of the struggle to put food on the table or a roof of some sort over their heads.   Steinbeck beautifully describes the lives and surroundings of these characters, so much so that you feel you can reach out and touch their them.  Here is how he introduces us to Doc’s laboratory:

Behind the office is a room where in aquaria are many living animals; there are also the microscopes and the slides and the drug cabinets, the cases of laboratory glass, the work benches and little motors, the chemicals.  From this room come smells – formaline, and dry starfish, and sea water and menthol, carbolic acid and acetic acid, smell of brown wrapping-paper and straw and rope, smell of chloroform and ether, smell of ozone from the motos, smell of fine steel and thin lubricant from the microscopes, smell of banana oil and rubber tubing, smell of drying wool socks and boots, sharp pungent smell of rattlesnakes, and musty frightening smell of rats.  And through the back door comes the smell of kelp and barnacles when the tide is out and the smell of salt and spray when the tide is in.

He continues to document Doc’s world in his library and kitchen, and then on to his person:

Doc is rather small, deceptively small, for he is wiry and very strong and when passionate anger comes on him he can be very fierce.  He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth.

And wonderful descriptions of this sort abound in this story about people.  But not to be outdone are the humorous pieces of observation, including this classic towards the end of the story when Mack and the boys (and entire neighbourhood) create a party for Doc:

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied.  It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual.  And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended.  This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses.  These are not parties at all, but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.

The humour exudes throughout the novel.  Even when the viewing is grim, there is the buoyancy of the human spirit, softening the edges and making the bizarre seem normal and even uplifting.

My edition is 136 pages long.  It’s not much, but it’s worth the effort.

Happy reading.

—

* according to Wikipedia the street that the novel is actually set in was Ocean View Avenue, but was later renamed to Cannery Row in honour of the story.

Quote of the Week

Ms Oh WailyLeave a comment

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you.  And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead.  And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

– The History Boys, Alan Bennett